The Coming Storm
by IndigoRiot
Summary: When the blood pools about her feet, it is still warm. The child gestures with that heavy sword to the Sunburst Throne, atop its pile of corpses. Her eyes shrine, reflecting its golden light like a mirror, and she says but a single word: Din. / Months before the Divine's conclave, Deshanna sends Lavellan to the peace talks, hoping to avert disaster before it strikes. T for themes.
1. The Sunburst Throne

_**The Sunburst Throne**_

When the blood pools about her feet, it is still warm.

The dream is vivid... as dreams of this kind always are. She smells smoke and ash on wind that rustles through the trees in a forest she does not recognise.

Deshanna steps forward with ears twitching, trying to catch sound, but the forest is silent save for a faint, grave, and haunting kind of music. Nothing breathes but for her, nothing moves but for the blood pooling about her feet. It runs now, gathering like a stream. As in the nature of such dreams, she follows it.

To the right, she passes the skeleton of an aravel, its tattered sails hanging loose like skin on the bones of the dead. To the left, a toppled structure - the sort only humans build these days - its stone-bricks crumbling into dust. There are leather-bound tomes, tarnished staves and shattered vials amongst the rubble. A circle tower?

She soon passes the origin of the music she heard. Cracked and bloodied husks of templars, their hollow armour catches the breeze and creates that strange and solemn music, like wind through pipes but reduced to a hum, almost inaudible but so incessantly _there_. And up ahead, towards the source of all the blood, a faint, golden light. It filters through leaves like shattered sunbeams.

" _Dirthamen'enaste,"_ Deshanna whispers, calling on her namesake for guidance as she so often did in these troubled times. The forest floor is littered with relics from every people of every age, chantry symbols, wooden carvings, trinkets and prayer books. Nothing escapes the bloodshed. _"Ma ghilana mir eolas*. Reveal to me the meaning of these dreams, that I might guide my kin to safer paths,"_ she prayed. She has been haunted of late by dreams such as these, demonless but full of despair, full of death. When she speaks of them - which is seldom, they are her burden alone - her son, her brave Mahanon, tries to console her. He tells her that they are but worries of the human's rising conflict, but she knows better. She has tasted this tang of the dreaming before. This is a warning.

Deshanna steps over a corpse larger than any she has passed so far, its charred horns twisting up from beneath the undergrowth. She sweeps away a low hanging branch and in the distance, she sees it once again, as she knew she would.

The sky runs red with all the blood their bruised and weeping earth could not hope to contain, and churns with a malevolence that chills Deshanna to her bones. Beneath it, there is a throne atop a mountain of corpses, splintered through with jagged crystals of violent red. There are warriors and peasant folk, mercenaries and children, nobles and farmers of every race. There are thieves and highwaymen beside chantry sisters, all the white of their robes stained crimson. She sees the faces of her clan among the dead, too, but in the cruel nature of dreams she cannot weep, cannot scream, only look upon the lost and despair.

The humans call it the Sunburst Throne. It is the seat of their Divine from which she preaches hope, love and light while her people subjugate and discriminate against all others - the Elves, the Dwarves, the Qu'nari, even their _own_ if they show any signs of magic.

The throne glitters and glints even now, casting off a dozen rays of fractured light that piece the mass of dead beneath it.

This, Deshanna realises, is the point at which despair usually overcomes her and she is thrust back into waking with a heaving chest and heavy heart. But it is not so now. The dream is changed. She feels it in the tingle of warm blood about her ankles, tastes it in the ash swirling through the air.

Just then a bird caws, interrupting the haunting melody in her ears. She casts her eyes towards the sound and spies a raven sitting atop one of the arms of the Sunburst Throne. It casts a beady eye down at her before spreading its wings and swooping past her. Its feathers flutter but a hairsbreadth from her cheek. She turns to follow it, and gasps.

" _Da'len,_ " she whispers at the figure behind her. The sound echoes. " _What are you doing h...?"_

The child - her child - a young face she has not seen in many moons, stands looking solemnly up at her. The raven perches neatly on her narrow shoulders, the black of its feathers indistinguishable from the sheet of her hair. The child's large grey eyes grow wide with supplication, and in outstretched and bloodied hands she lifts a pure and spotless sword.

Curious, Deshanna looks closer. On the surface of the sword she sees reflected not the dismal, baleful world around her, but a different scene. No blood, nor despair, nor torment. Her clan, alive and well. The human nations, warless. The sky, blue and serene. She sees a world safe and whole and _right_.

The child gestures with that heavy sword to the Sunburst Throne, her eyes reflecting its golden light like a mirror, and says but a single word:

 _Din*._

* * *

Deshanna returned to the waking world with a jolt; cold, shaking, breathless. She sat bolt upright, clutching her chest as though afraid her heart might make its frantic escape at any moment.

"Mother?"

Deshanna blinked, trying to catch her breath. Eventually, she was able to focus on the familiar but concerned gaze of a pair of dark eyes before her. The wrong pair of eyes. A moment ago she was staring into grey.

"Mahanon?" she asked, disoriented.

"You were dreaming again," he explained slowly. He lifted a cloth to wipe her brow, so tenderly for one with such a fire to his temper. "They're getting worse."

"Itharia," Deshanna said suddenly, her eyes darting around the tent. She began to lift furs and blankets in the hope that she might suddenly appear beneath them.

"What?"

"Itharia," Deshanna repeated.

"Itha?"

"Yes, Itha!" Deshanna cried, suddenly exasperated. She was beginning to piece together the implications of the change in her dream, and she did not like the direction it had taken. "Your sister. Where is she?"

Mahanon frowned, as he was recently prone to doing whenever Itharia was called such. Though they shared no blood, Deshanna had raised the pair as siblings. It was clear they cared for each other dearly, yet she had suspected for some time that Mahanon's affection for her ran deeper than a brother's love. There were rumours amongst the youth of the clan that he had other designs for their future, and the pairing, though odd, would be no scandal... but that was a conversation for another time.

"...You think you've figured out what it means, don't you?" Mahanon surmised, his brown eyes glinting keenly in the dark.

Deshanna nodded. "The dream has changed," she elaborated. "And I must speak with your sister. Do you know where she is?"

Mahanon's eyes tightened, and he nodded.

* * *

 _*Ma ghilana mir eolas. - Guide me towards knowledge/understanding._

 _*Din - Death._

* * *

 _ **A/N:** __Just a prelude for another short story that's been rattling around in my head. Any and all elvhen included is thanks to fenxshiral's amazing lexicon._

 _Please don't be shy to leave a comment or criticism, I'm always interested to hear what other people think of my writing. I've been away from FF for a little while, and it's so lonely out there. Don't be afraid to show a girl a little love! Haha, jk, Kinda. I do love follows and comments hahaha_

 _Anyway, thanks for reading. Peace and love!_

 _~ Indie_


	2. By Your Hand

**Chapter Two: By Your Hand**

Ithari heard him crashing through the undergrowth long before he stepped foot in the clearing - and longer still before he'd placed his hands over her eyes. She allowed him the simple pleasure of thinking he'd snuck up on her, however, because he so dearly loved to gloat about it, and because it pleased her to see him happy.

"Some rougue you are," a voice teased behind her ear.

She sighed, a smile curling its way across her mouth, and rolled her eyes. "Got me again," Ithari complained, twisting around and out of his grip.

"You make it too easy," her brother replied, tapping the end of her nose with his finger, which she swatted away. "Always buried in your books, scribbling away. You're lucky it was just me this time, and not some shemlen brute-"

"Mahanon!" she scolded, but he ignored her.

She suspected Mahanon would never quite understand her sympathy for the humans. He tolerated few else besides the people of Markham, and even those he only grudgingly accepted because their unique government in turn made them more accepting of the Dalish, who were seen as intriguing, if not beneficial, trade partners. On her part, she found them fascinating. The humans were a people so powerful and privileged, yet how they struggled so beneath a legacy of blood and shame. She wondered if they would ever find a way to rise above it, and finally realise they weren't so different to the other races of Thedas after all.

"So, have you unlocked the secrets of the Beyond yet?" Mahanon teased, changing the subject as he sensed another lecture on racial unity and an ideal world. He plucked the leather bound journal from her hands and leafed through, but couldn't make out much from the soft, pre-dawn light on the horizon.

Ithari groaned with frustration, reclaimed her journal and paced back to the campfire, taking a seat on the log beside her bow and quiver. "Not really," she sighed. And then, "Would you mind-"

No sooner had she said the words than a sigil of immolation appeared on the ground beside her. She immediately flicked through to the most recent page and began comparing in earnest while Mahanon held the sigil. She knew he could suspend it for around three minutes - no more - before he would be forced to dispel it, lest the thing blow up in her face.

Ithari studied the arrangement on ground and page: three concentric circles off-centre to the fourth; a cage of runes, repeated, around the outer circumference; a curved line of larger glyphs, the recipe for the blast; finally, a complex arrangement of interlocking lines and curves in the centre - the symbol for fire. Her replication on page was perfect. She sighed and flicked her wrist at Mahanon. The amber sigil faded with a hiss.

Mahanon lay his stave on the ground and took a seat next to her as she began to idly trace over the sigil again with a piece of charcoal.

The bottom, centre-most glyph bothered her most. It was the pointed one she saw replicated in other glyphs, too, like an upside 'V' that curled away at the ends like ram's horns. She thought that this was the one responsible for channelling energy out of the fade and into reality, like a siphon, or a funnel. But it seemed to her the sign itself was not enough. It demanded something more - a catalyst, like a mage's will - to set the energies flowing.

"Perhaps it is the arrowhead?" she heard Mahanon suggest casually. "Maybe something is askew."

"It can't be," Ithari dismissed, but she took it up and passed over regardless. Mahanon twisted it this way and that, inspecting her handiwork. She knew he would find no inconsistencies there. "It is me. I am lacking."

"Don't be ridiculous," he scoffed. "You're anything but."

She snatched it back. "I'm not. The mages have their dreams," Ithari lamented, twisting the arrowhead about between her fingers. "The dwarves have their lyruim. I have neither. Only dreamless sleep, endless thoughts, unanswerable questions and - ouch," she exclaimed, cutting herself on the arrow's sharpened tip. Blood ran down, catching in the engraved runes like small rivulets.

Her eyes snapped up to meet Mahanon's.

"No," he said, instantly. "It is forbidden."

"Not yours," Ithari huffed, dropping the arrowhead and returning to her journal with a fevered urgency. She paused barely long enough to suck the blood from her fingertip and wrap it with a scrap of leather before scribbling away again. This time, she altered the position of several glyphs, and changed the 'V' to that other symbol. The one she'd discovered while rifling through books in that slaver's caravan she'd liberated last year with the other hunters. The one the Keeper ordered to be burned. The one Ithari had committed to memory before then, like most everything else she saw.

She showed Mahanon the sigil again, with her alterations. "Do you think it will work?"

"I think you're insane," he replied, not even bothering to grace the page with a look. "The Keeper would be furious -"

"Mother doesn't need to know -"

"She would find out -"

"How? Are you going to tell her?" she accused.

"You think I would... no!" he spluttered with offence. "She'll find out when you bleed yourself dry, Itha, or an evil spirit wears your skin," Mahanon snapped. "It's not only mages who can fall prey to demons, you know. Blood magic is a dark road, and she has enough to worry about right now without you acting like a fool!" He stopped his tirade to roll his shoulders out, and rub a muscle in his neck. "If you stopped sneaking away from camp at night to obsess over your little projects, you might have realised that."

Ithari caught his eye. Her brother was born with a fire in his belly, everyone in the clan knew this. The elders said he was the spitting image of his father, the old Keeper, before he passed and their mother stepped up to take his place. His temper was a fickle thing, but he had never shown signs of losing it with her before. "What's happened?" she asked.

Mahanon looked away and began pacing. He sighed heavily. "It's the dreams again. She's getting worse." He caught her eyes with his own from across the campfire. Its light turned their dark brown a rich amber, and the shadows playing on his pale face twisted the thorns of Elgar'nan's vallaslin across his brow, intensifying his expression of concern. He looked suddenly older than he should. "What if she takes ill?"

Ithari closed the journal and placed it within a pocket of her cloak. "Mahanon, she won't. Mother has always dreamed such," she consoled, stepping over to him and placing a hand on his arm. "More often than not, she has found wisdom in them. They have always served the clan well."

"This time is different. It has her shaken like no other." Mahanon exhaled, and took her hands. "She asked for you."

"For me? Why?"

"She would not say. Only that it was urgent."

Ithari paused.

She had never been troubled with the matter of dreams. As long as she could remember, Ithari had never had any herself, and the Keeper had never answered any of her questions why, nor had she disclosed to Ithari the contents of her own dreams, no matter how important she had deemed them. Dreams were a mystery to her, but never a cause for concern. For the Keeper to want to involve her now...

Ithari wasn't sure if she should be pleased or not. From the grave look in Manahon's eye, her gut settled with the latter.

"Then I should go," she said simply.

By the time they reached camp, the bashful sun had mustered up courage enough to peek over the mountaintops; its tentative light stretched out to the very tips of the aravel's sails, making them shine like beacons against the stark white-and-grey backdrop of the Vinmark mountains.

The camp was so calm at this time of day. The children yet slumbered softly, and those adults who had wakened began about their duties with a quiet ease. Several stopped to greet or nod at Mahanon and Ithari as they passed by; the First and the Craftsmaster's brightest apprentice, were owed this much respect.

Ithari peered into the keeper's tent, and found it empty.

"Keeper Istimaethoriel went to the herb wagon."

She turned to see young Erilen sitting nearby, fletching arrows with a tongue poking out.

"Here," she smiled, crouching down beside him. This boy of seven had been trying for Master Shoran's favour for three months now. Such determination in one so young should be recognised, she thought. Besides, he showed promise. Ithari gently took his hand with the feather and guided it just a couple of finger-width's down the shaft. "Don't forget to leave room for fingers above the nock, it's very important. Did you remember to soak the sinew?"

Eirlen nodded.

"Good. It sticks better that way. You are doing well, Eirlen."

His answering smile was bright in return. " _Ma serranas, hahren_.*"

" _Telahna*_ ," she hushed, laughing with a finger over her lips. "Don't let Master Shoran hear you call me that, or we'll both be in trouble," she grinned.

He mimicked a finger over his lips too like a secret shared. Then she left him to his work and went to the herb wagon. As she approached, she heard Mahanon was already there. By the tenor of his voice, he was unhappy about something. She rolled her eyes. He usually was.

"But I am your First. I have a duty to the clan -"

"You have a duty to me, da'len," came their mother's strict reply. When Ithari stepped into the wagon, she saw that the Keeper looked as tired as she sounded.

Mahanon waved a hand around in frustration. "How can I be expected to guide and protect us in the future when there is so much you will not tell me?" he impored.

"Yet," Keeper Istimaethoriel corrected. She placed a hand on his cheek. "Yet, ma _da'avise*_. I would not burden you with knowledge you are not prepared for. Indeed, I would not burden anyone with these dreams, were it my choice."

Ithari cleared her throat. "You called for me, mother?"

"Ithari," she said warmly, but the smile did not quite reach her vividly green eyes. "I did. It seems we are running low on elfroot. Come, I would have you walk with me, and perhaps Sylaise will bless our path," she said, stepping forward and lacing an arm through hers. She gave Mahanon a look that clearly said 'do not follow'.

They took the path down towards the valley and the forest that lay there. Ithari heard the sounds of its awakening with the rising sun. The chattering of birds and rustling of of squirrels in the trees, a gurgling stream somewhere in the distance. There was a thin and crisp layer of snow beneath their boots, crunching above the frostbitten ground with every step they took.

"Mahanon is worried for you," Ithari began, "though he does not say it straight."

"That boy does not say anything straight," her mother sighed. "He is too much like me."

"I know," Ithari agreed with a knowing smile. "We have elfroot enough to last until spring, do we not?"

The Keeper laughed, and though it was tighter than usual, it was a welcome sound. "Nothing escapes your knowing eyes, does it?"

She shrugged. "If you didn't want Mahanon to follow, why not just say?"

"I suppose, _da'assan_ *, it is because I do not fly as straight as you." The Keeper stooped here to cut a sprig of elfroot sheltered beneath the pines. "It is a quality of yours I find myself in need of this morning."

"The dreams," Ithari stated.

The Keeper breathed a sigh that seemed to hold many years within it. "Yes." She gestured for Ithari to take a seat beside her on tall, gnarled root. "You won't remember this, you were too young, but you know the story well, do you not, of the day we found you in the woods outside Starkhaven?"

Ithari nodded, confused by the direction this conversation had taken. She seldom thought of her childhood before she came to be with clan Lavellan. The Keeper was right, she was too young to remember... much. When she tried, all she could muster were strange impressions. The sound of a mirror shattering, the hiss and crackle of a storm, the taste of earth and smell of blood; they were not things she liked to remember. "It was the day Keeper Aridhel died."

Istimaethoriel nodded. "Yes, it was, Falon'din guide his soul," she whispered. "What I have not told you, da'len, is that I dreamed of you before that day ever came to pass."

Ithari turned to catch her eye, surprised.

"I was younger, then, and we journeyed south for the winter," she began. The Keeper's voice had taken on the timbre of storytelling, and it took Ithari back to her days as a child sitting around the fire, listening to the history of their people. "For weeks, I saw a child in my dreams as I slept. She had hair like midnight, eyes as large as the moon, and sat atop an elvhen ruin with a flower in her hands. Every night, I would watch as she swung her legs atop it, smiling while it bloomed in her palms," Istimaethoriel reminisced fondly. "I took it to mean that a child was on the way. I suppose I was not completely wrong."

Ithari smiled. "No, I suppose not."

"So I took you in, this mysterious child who spoke not a word of common, but knew words from our past that even we, the lorekeepers, had forgotten. You, who came to us with June's favour so clear on your young skin," the Keeper continued, sweeping a thumb over the vallaslin on her cheek. "And you were watching, always watching, with bright, clear eyes that looked like they wanted to swallow the whole world. Nothing escapes you. It is my hope, da'len, that you might see some meaning in my dreams of late that I have missed," she concluded solemnly. "For I have found what message in it I can, and I do not like what it says."

Ithari flicked through the pages ripped from her journal, where images from her mother's dream adorned the most recent pages.

In the one sketch, bodies and ruins lay beside trees that twisted up into the abyssal sky. They were of a kind she had not seen, but felt she recognised, somehow. Another book, perhaps? She made a note to search through Markham's library when they next passed by. There was a double page spread of smaller drawings: a pendant in the shape of a sword; a wooden carving of the human prophet, Andraste, with a bowl of flame; a keen eye, pierced, within a starburst. The last, she circled. It was curious.

On the next leaf she'd drawn that glowing throne atop a mass grave of corpses, in stark relief to the dark and ashen sky. There were several sketches of the bird the Keeper saw from different angles, both perched and in flight. Her mother described it as a raven, and she had drawn it so, but without seeing it herself, it could just have easily been a crow or some other carrion bird. They were drawn to the dead, after all.

The last sketch was of her childlike self in a ragged dress, wide-eyed and sombre, with a sword as tall as she in palms outstretched.

Her mother's telling of the dream was... surreal. Ithari had no experience of dreaming or the fade from which to draw on. All she knew of both was what Mahanon had told her, or else had heard in stories.

"Mahanon says that the fade reflects the world around us," Ithari began, after a long silence, speaking of things she could but scarcely imagine. "But that it is not bound by time. Could it be that you are seeing an impression of the past?"

"With my Mahanon and so many dear others among the dead?" the Keeper challenged.

Ithari shrugged, and countered, "But I am there, and no longer a child, and it is unlikely I ever will be again. I do not think it can be anything other than past." She paused to think a while, and pondered on the fallen circle tower and templar husks. "Fighting between mages and templars grows with each passing day. The merchants on the road spoke of the divine calling for peace talks. If it ends badly... perhaps you fear another Exaulted March, and the dead are a reflection of this. The Chantry has not been kind to our people before..."

"I will admit, it is an angle I had not considered," the Keeper granted with a nod. "But what of the raven? The sword in your hands? The wish from your mouth? _Din_ ," she echoed finally.

"I wish no one dead mother." Ithari breathed a wry laugh and shook her head. She mused on the image of herself with the raven atop her shoulder. "The sword, perhaps, is a sign to prepare to defend the clan against violence. The raven... an omen of death. Many have already lost their lives to the conflict. Is that not why we have kept to the mountains since the Arlathven? Perhaps the dream is a sign to stay, or keep moving north?"

"Perhaps. But we cannot run forever, my child," Istimaethoriel said sadly. "And what is running but another form of submission? We are the last Elvhen..."

"... _I tel'sal juvaslasir.*"_ Ithari finished in a whisper.

"Never again shall we submit," the Keeper echoed.

"Very well, mother. I have offered you what I can. What do you see in this dream?" she asked.

"I see not a dream, but a vision of things to come if I do not heed its advice," the Keeper took the pile of papers, leafing through the sketches as she spoke. Her voice was grave. "The hostilities between the mages and templars will continue to grow, leaving no people unscathed. The Divine shall orchestrate her talks, but they will not end peacefully. There will be a great and terrible event. It will tear the land, bloody all peoples, and cause the sky to weep beyond consolation. No one will survive the coming fire."

Ithari felt a chill travel down her spine at her mothers words. They held all the weight of prophecy. Of fate. "And what must be done to stop this devastation?"

Istimaethoriel cupped her face. Her emerald stare was penetrating, and grieved. "Simply this. Before any of this occurs, the Divine must die. By your hand, da'len."

* * *

 _*Ma serranas, hahren_ \- thank you, elder/teacher.

* _Telanha_ \- be quiet / don't speak. equivalent with 'shh' or 'hush' in the common tongue.

 _**Ma da'avise_ \- my little flame. an endearment for someone who is emotional or quick to anger, but who cares greatly.

 _*Da'assan_ \- little arrow. an endearment typically used for hunters, but can be applied to anyone who is straight-shooting, forthright in their manner and words.

* _I tel'sal juvaslasir -_ never again shall we submit. Lit. translation: never again shall we accept chains.

* * *

A/N: Hey guys, it's me again. I hope everyone has had a lovely winter break, christmas time, etc etc, and that the start of the New Year has been kind to everyone! As always, feel free to drop a comment if you're reading this, I love hearing what you have to say and I'll always try and get back to you to answer any questions.

Peace and love!

~ Indie x


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